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THE CINE-EYE GOES DIGITAL: VERTOV, PARADJANOV AND THE
“POETIC DATABASE”
by
Daria Shembel
_____________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Daria Shembel

"The Cine-Eye Goes Digital" provides a revisionist study of poetic film through the concept of "poetic database" and examines how the theory and practice of poetry/film convergence laid the groundwork for the development of new media "database aesthetics" (Manovich). The project focuses on the experimental cinema of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Paradjanov and explores how the search for poetic sensibility in their works has led to the strategies of interchangeability, interactivity and virtuality that represent an essential part of their "poetic databases" and further define the logic of digital environments as a whole.; Sustaining the links between theory and practice of poetic cinema, the films of Vertov and Paradjanov are placed within the specific theoretical approaches: the Formalist (pre)-semiotic and Western "ocularcentic" tradition (Pasolini, Deleuze) that inform the sources of their "poetic databases" and provide the basis for the narratological and rhizomatic methods of the analysis of digital environments.; The study also investigates the tension between totalizing ideology and the utopian liberation of perception in Vertov's work and the paradoxical effect it has on limitations that cultural production encounters in the age of digital media. My approach is partly based on the film theory of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose analysis of virtuality and the senses is applied to Paradjanov's tableaux aesthetics, while Deleuze's work on de/re-territorialization, in collaboration with Felix Guattari, is used to underscore Vertov's conflict between liberated perception and the politics of form. By examining how different approaches to poetic cinema led to the logic of the "poetic database" the dissertation reveals the internal paradoxes within the database culture: on the one hand, it may release new creative energy and freedom, and, on the other, due to its reliance on the maximum efficiency of communication, it could just as well function as the source of new restrictions.

THE CINE-EYE GOES DIGITAL: VERTOV, PARADJANOV AND THE
“POETIC DATABASE”
by
Daria Shembel
_____________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES)
May 2009
Copyright 2009 Daria Shembel